Cover story

Christina Lee and the makings of a career at Disney

By Stephanie Schupska

For Christina Lee and the other five individuals on Walt Disney Imagineering’s Show Software Interactives Team, the 20-hour workdays leading up to opening day of Disney’s NBA Experience were a mad dash of hardware and software and cameras and basketballs and hoops and slam dunks and code and more cameras and late nights and coffee-fueled mornings. The grand opening came like a sigh of relief.

“The cool part of the NBA Experience and the grand opening is that we got to see the first guests come through the door and see it for the first time,” she said.

“There was one little kid, we ended up referring to him just as the Lakers kid.” At four years old, by her rough estimate, he proudly wore a purple and gold Los Angeles Lakers jersey.

On opening day, Aug. 12, 2019, the little boy stepped through the doors of the NBA Experience and stood frozen in place, his excited face illuminated by two stories’ worth of colors, lights, and video monitors.

“The Lakers kid comes in and looks up—there are all these moving lights, and it’s kind of insane when you first walk in—and his jaw just drops,” Christina said. “That moment right there just encapsulates everything that makes the late nights completely worth it. It brings the magic back.”

Full-time Disney

Christina, an Honors senior and Foundation Fellow majoring in computer science, spent this past summer and fall working with Walt Disney Imagineering in Orlando. The first half of her internship revolved around the NBA Experience, an immersive, basketball-themed venue in Disney Springs that is “a slam dunk of fun for fans of all ages,” according to the Disney website. There, guests are invited to live out their NBA and WNBA hoop fantasies through 13 different guest experiences.

“We’re trying to create a space for any NBA or WNBA fan,” she said. “If you’re into stats and learning, there are experiences for you. If you want to feel like an NBA player, if you want to be drafted, if you want to dunk and have that sweet, beautiful photo of it, we have spaces for you.”

If the first half of her internship was an all-out sprint, the second half of Christina’s time in Orlando more closely mirrored an average work week—a work week that she will pick up again after she graduates from UGA in May.

Starting in June, she will be working full-time at Disney World, which was the most visited theme park resort across the globe in 2018, according to the 2018 Theme Index and Museum Index: The Global Attractions Attendance Report, published by the Themed Entertainment Association.

Disney World’s Magic Kingdom Theme Park was No. 1 worldwide in number of visitors. With an attendance of 20,859,000, it hosted close to a third of the 58.3 million people who traveled to Walt Disney World Resort in 2018. Epcot, which houses Christina’s next major projects, was Disney World’s third-most visited theme park that year, with 12.4 million visitors.

Disney World is made up of four theme parks (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom), two water parks, 36 hotels (27 Disney-themed and nine non-Disney), golf courses, and other venues. The Show Software Interactives Team works with all new projects that require software integration.

The majority of Christina’s team is now working predominately on Epcot’s new Play Pavilion, which is scheduled to open in 2021.

“It’s fun because we are much further back in the project life cycle than the NBA Experience,” she said. “Instead of being involved in rapid installation, I’m much more focused on systems architecture.”

Disney’s Creative Team is envisioning the entire new Epcot experience, and her Show Software Interactives Team is doing their part to bring the vision to life. Their work includes preplanning, testing, mocking up, finding technology, assessing risks, and working with lighting, audio/video, operations, show set designers, and facilities to make sure that the show software will collaborate correctly with other systems.

“We bring in some of the constraints to projects, because we can’t break the laws of physics, even if sometimes the Creative Team wants us to,” she said. “It’s a really interesting job in that it’s not just a list of tasks. There is a lot of room for collaboration. We’re all working toward making the best possible experience for all of our guests.”

Dreaming Disney

Disney has been Christina’s big dream “for forever,” she said. “I didn’t really know how I was going to get there.”

Jonathan Demery

Christina started college as a biology major. By her sophomore year, she had switched to mechanical engineering and theatre and was working in the scene shop for the UGA Theatre Department. As a junior, she landed on computer science and English, participated in the Disney College Program as a custodian, and then started a two-year internship at Netherworld Haunted House. She will finish UGA with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and, because of a condensed class load after an extra semester at Disney, a minor in English.

Along the way, she discovered a passion for themed entertainment design and technology.

“It is such a niche field,” she said. “I did some independent CURO projects, which allowed me to explore what I was interested in and teach myself a lot of the skills that I wouldn’t have learned in classes.”

In her final semester at UGA, she’s flipping the self-teaching model, taking one class in particular that is helping to explain some of the processes she had to learn on the fly during her Disney internship.

“I’m taking computer networks right now with Dr. Keshtgari, and she’s amazing,” Christina said. Manijeh Keshtgari is a lecturer of computer science in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

“We network everything at Disney, but networks were something I had no experience with in the slightest. There was a lot of on-the-job learning. In her class, I’m putting the final pieces together, and some of the concepts I didn’t quite understand are falling into place.”

Managing Disney magic

While her major is computer science and she is on the Show Software Interactives Team at Disney, that doesn’t mean Christina will spend her days in Orlando writing code.

Instead, her team spends most of its time in project and vendor management, systems planning, and problem solving. They are figuring out every single aspect of the hardware and software used in each guest experience and how those items are going to communicate with each other.

“It’s really finding the proper hardware and finding what suits the application best,” she said, “based off software needs, based off creative needs, based off maintenance needs, based off the fact that the majority of our stuff needs to run anywhere from 12 to 18 hours a day, 365 days a year, for at least four years, which is a lot of load to put on hardware.”

For Epcot’s play pavilion, Christina has spent a large amount of time planning conduit runs, using problem solving, systems architecture, and systems engineering to figure out where the wires need to go.

She was deep into conduit meetings on Nov. 12, 2019, when The Imagineering Story came out on Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, detailing the behind-the-scenes work that makes Disney magical. Christina’s phone lit up as her friends kept texting variations of “oh my gosh, your job is so cool,” she said. “And I’m in my fifth meeting of the day about conduit and making sure that we get the conduit correct before we pour the concrete. That’s kind of the less cool aspect of the job that is still very real.”

Full Disney circle

Christina’s childhood included an annual family trip from Atlanta to Orlando; she has happy memories of those yearly visits to Disney World.

“It’s cool now to work on Epcot projects,” she said. “Growing up in my nerdy family, that was one of our favorite places because of its educational components.”

Her parents and little brother were able to join her at the NBA Experience and are excited to see the changes at Epcot next year, she said.

Christina also enjoys exploring the connections at Disney, linking attractions to the people who helped bring them to life.

“As I meet more people who have been at the company for a while and talk to them, I realize that some of my family’s favorite experiences or attractions growing up were some of their first projects,” she said. “It’s just a very, very surreal feeling. This attraction that holds such a big place in my heart and has so many memories associated with it, I’m literally having a conversation with the person who brought it to life, and that’s pretty cool.

“The best part about it, aside from all the good, fun problem-solving and everything, is that at the end of the day, everything we are working toward is to create these enchanting places where families and loved ones and friends can come and create memories.

“It’s incredibly crazy to think that somehow I’ve made it here.”